RE: Swap space question
> When I first installed Debian Sparc from the CD, I partitioned a Gig
> of Swap space since I have half a Gig of Ram. The Slink kernel would
I have often seen this "rule of thumb" used in this way and I believe that
it has long been misinterpreted. The rule that I am talking about is "you
need at least twice the amount of swap space as you have RAM".
I am pretty sure that the original interpretation of this rule was more
along the lines of "determine how much memory you will need to run
everything you need to run, then make sure that at least 1/3 of that is
physical RAM".
The intention here is a trade off between system performance and cost.
Hardware has, however, progressed to a point where this rule is pretty much
useless for normal systems. If you are running a machine with 512M of RAM,
then you probably don't really need to configure any swap space at all
unless the machine will need it for running a big database or some other
memory hungry application. That 1G of swap space could be used for a much
better purpose (like storing 1G of pron or mp3s.. hehe). If you ever really
do need the extra memory, simple create a swap partition and use swapon as
the need arises.
Just my $0.02 (+10%GST) worth.
Regards
Michael Anthon
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